Re: Bidirectional Text

[Tod Olson]

>>>>> "Ted" == Ted Harding <Ted> writes:

Ted> At present I am looking at the question of right-to-left
Ted> languages (as in european) and left-to-right languages (as in
Ted> Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), especially in connection with switching
Ted> from one form to the other in the course of a single text.

Ted> I'm doing this for the sake of groff (GNU troff), being a
Ted> maintainer of the package, and I have been looking at the work of
Ted> Daniel Berry...

Ted>   http://www.cs.tachnion.ac.il/~dberry/

Ted> Because of the way that ditroff... generates its output... it is
Ted> quite feasible... to write an intervening postprocessor [to
Ted> properly reorder the text for display.]

You might consider going Unicode.  I handles the multiple character
sers without funky escape sequnces and specifies an algorithm for this
memory to display reordering (the bidirectional algorithm, or BIDI).
There are a few free Unicode packages.  Eg. I'm using ICU to (slowly)
build a Unicode-aware version of Gema.  Here are a couple links:

    http://www.unicode.org/
    http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/icu
    http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/ucdata.html

There may be a reference implementation at the Unicode site.  ICU has
the advantage of providing routines to translate from a large number
of encodings to UTF-16 and back, and of being Unicode 3.0 compliant.
I've not used UCData.  QT from TrollTech also has Unicode abilities.

I have no idea how much the GNU brand restricts the above choices.

Tod A. Olson                        "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
address@hidden               "If you weren't mad, you wouldn't have
The University of Chicago Library    come here," said the Cat.